After sobering up the next day, both men calmed down a little and seemed to be avoiding each other.
Qin Siyu had been drunk, and Aston had been somewhat drunk too. Everything they’d done had been far too wild, crossing the line completely.
Qin Siyu couldn’t quite explain what he wanted.
Aston hadn’t kept pressing him. Qin Siyu seemed relieved, yet somehow… not happy.
His mind kept replaying everything from that day.
He could vaguely remember it. He had tilted back his head to catch the liquor, but had managed only two mouthfuls before Aston drank the last one himself. Qin Siyu grew desperate, followed the last sip, and Aston caught his mouth with a kiss. The alcohol mingled noisily in their mouths, stinging and spicy, before the two of them swallowed it.
They had kissed for a very long time, until Qin Siyu collapsed to the ground.
Then Aston had taken him home himself. In the empty living room they had kissed and entangled themselves again. And this time they had actually…
Qin Siyu had never known that part of his body could be treated that way. He understood that men and women could join together, though only vaguely, but he had truly never known—
After that day, Qin Siyu could no longer control himself.
He’d gone back to the hospital afterward and was living at home. Yet late every night, Qin Siyu would…
He leaned against his bed frame, closed his eyes, and carefully recalled what Aston had done that day, the pressure of his hands. Every place, every detail, he reproduced one by one.
He even reversed his hand to pretend it belonged to the man facing him. His thighs grew rigid, his muscles taut. He clenched his teeth, pressed his tongue against his palate, and whenever he recalled that final kiss, and the clear, bright blue that had filled his vision when he opened his eyes, he would again—
His lips hung half open, his eyes vacant. He desperately wanted to kiss and see Aston again, but he couldn’t. He had to calm down.
Fortunately, the feeling of their lips and tongues that day, and the color of Aston’s eyes, were already engraved in his mind and etched into his bones.
His bed frame was so worn out that Qin Siyu pulled the entire bed a little farther from the wall. Even so, its creaking left him constantly on edge.
He didn’t dare lose control completely. So although every night he… the longing continued to build.
He had indeed learned. But all he could do was imagine Aston.
He saw his own hand, yet pictured Aston’s. That hand had a different skin color, longer fingers, and a larger palm. Its calluses were not those produced by manual labor, as his were, but those formed by fencing and other training. They lay in different places. When the callus between Aston’s thumb and forefinger had rubbed against him, Qin Siyu had felt near collapse.
During the day, Qin Siyu continued working diligently as a volunteer.
Because of his performance, he was now allowed to take a greater part in medical work.
One day, on a day off, Qin Siyu returned to Berkeley.
He spent two full days in the library, because two patients at the hospital were weighing heavily on his mind and he wanted to help them.
The first was a Black girl.
She had been diagnosed with syphilis.
Her symptoms were very typical. A butterfly-shaped rash had appeared on her face, dark-red blotches spreading over both cheeks. She had a fever, fatigue, and aching limbs. Her kidney function was badly impaired: she passed very little urine, and heating it turned it cloudy; adding nitric acid produced a precipitate, indicating proteinuria. Her blood urea nitrogen was elevated. She was also severely anemic, with low white and red blood cell counts.
It all seemed so typical that the doctor immediately ordered a test for syphilis. Sure enough, the result was positive.
Her family had feared an infection when she developed a fever and brought her to the hospital.
The doctors had seen this countless times.
When the positive result was explained to her family, her father’s face turned livid. In front of several doctors, he even slapped her. The crack echoed through the corridor. ‘Shameless!!! Who have you been seducing when you go out every day?! You caught that filthy disease!!!’
The Black girl looked stunned. Tears streamed down her cheeks, making the red patches on her face more prominent and painful to look at. She shouted, ‘I didn’t!!! I’m still a virgin!!!’
Her father pointed at her. ‘You said you were working as a cleaner in a hotel during the day! I believed you! But you were going there to sleep with people!!!’
Her mother looked deeply disappointed too.
‘Mom! Mom!’ the girl cried.
But her mother asked with disappointment, ‘Was it a white man? Or a Black man? Pearl, we’ve always taught you… not to be promiscuous, not to be depraved. But…’
Her parents appeared to be a hardworking family. Her father’s skin was dark, his knuckles large and marked by years of labor, and the same was true of her mother.
The girl seemed on the verge of collapse. She screamed, ‘I didn’t! I didn’t! I really didn’t! I’ve never done that!’
Of course nobody believed her.
Society had long considered Black people generally lacking in morality: promiscuous, pleasure-seeking, irresponsible… It seemed she had been ‘revealed for what she really was.’ Besides, the symptoms looked so typical, and the syphilis test was positive. What possible exception could there be?
Qin Siyu stepped forward first. He intercepted the girl’s parents and said, ‘Everyone, please calm down. The important thing now is getting her well, isn’t it? This is a hospital, not somewhere else. Please keep your voices down.’
‘…’ Her parents fell silent but continued whispering to him, ‘How could she…? How could she…?’
Qin Siyu replied, ‘I’m sorry, but my job is to help people recover their health, not to pass moral judgment.’
He took the girl to the medical ward and treated her gently. She cried the whole time. ‘I really am a virgin… There’s no way I can have this disease…’
Qin Siyu asked, ‘Have you ever had a blood transfusion?’
But Pearl said no.
Qin Siyu asked again, ‘Then… have you come into contact with fresh blood in any form? Kissing, perhaps?’ Although transmission of syphilis by such means was almost impossible and the odds extremely low, once someone was diagnosed with it they would inevitably be treated as promiscuous.
Pearl shook her head again, despairing. ‘I haven’t touched anything! I don’t know… I don’t know… Why do I have this…? Why do I have this?!’
When Qin Siyu returned, the doctor on duty shrugged and even laughed. ‘Just another day at the hospital! Nine out of ten people with syphilis won’t admit it.’
But Qin Siyu was unusually sensitive to the nuances of people’s emotions. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the girl wasn’t lying, that she wasn’t ‘promiscuous.’
At the same time, another patient was troubling him.
This patient was the ‘madwoman.’
She was irritable and hysterical.
All her tests had come back normal, so the hospital believed she was mentally ill.
She also complained of severe abdominal pain, but the doctors assumed it was probably because her period had just ended.
They were giving her sedatives. But they didn’t seem to help much, and her mental state actually appeared to be deteriorating.
Her husband said, ‘It’s all because of the times we’re living in! Every day we’re afraid of losing our jobs… Women are more fragile, you know. She finally broke under the strain.’
In Chinatown, Qin Siyu had actually found women to be the stronger ones, often better able to accept upheaval and adapt to changing circumstances. He asked casually, ‘Was your wife always “fragile” before?’
The man seemed to fall silent for a few seconds. Uncertainly he said, ‘I suppose she must have been?’
‘…’ Qin Siyu knew he couldn’t recall a single example. He simply thought his wife must be fragile. Women had to be fragile. They were supposed to be.
Following protocol, when administering the sedative, Qin Siyu reassured her. ‘Try not to think so much about unemployment. The economy is already beginning to improve. Relax a little.’
But she snapped, ‘I haven’t been thinking about any of that!’
Her parents were distraught. ‘She used to be such a cheerful girl!’
Her husband contradicted them firmly. ‘In times like these, even I can’t stay cheerful. How could she? She was only pretending to be strong. She’s a woman, after all.’
Her father agreed, and her mother was persuaded as well.
Qin Siyu quietly paid attention.
The woman’s dress had been mended, and the patch was very new. She’d obviously selected the fabric with care. It matched the dress, and she’d cut it into a special shape. Her skirt had a floral pattern, and the patch was a butterfly, dancing among the flowers. Qin Siyu was that sort of person himself, so he couldn’t believe she’d been on the verge of a breakdown when she’d mended her skirt not long before. Someone about to collapse wouldn’t have had the heart for that.
He began paying a little more attention, though he didn’t think too much of it. When the patient complained of stomach pain again, he informed the doctor on duty. The doctor asked Qin Siyu to have her leave a urine sample.
The patient complied.
That night, when he went to collect the urine, Qin Siyu was surprised to discover it had a strangely red color under the light.
‘???’ He reported it to the doctor on duty, who didn’t think this particularly rare. ‘That’s perfectly normal. Her period has only just ended. Perhaps there’s a little more bleeding.’
Qin Siyu: ‘But—’
‘All right, all right.’ The hospital’s duty doctors were always terribly busy. ‘Arrange a transfer to psychiatry.’
Perhaps the economy truly was dire, because the psychiatric ward had no beds available just then.
The matter continued to trouble Qin Siyu. Since the patient was still in the emergency department, he went back to the university library to search the medical literature carefully.
There were countless medical journals and papers. Perhaps some newly described cases would match these two patients?
Qin Siyu spent two entire days in the library.
He hauled out dozens of books at a time, stacked them into a mountain on the table, and leafed through them at astonishing speed.
He knew precisely what he was looking for, so he read only articles with words like ‘red rash’ or ‘mental illness’ in their titles or summaries, averaging about one book a minute.
His friend Wu Xintong, sitting nearby, asked in astonishment, ‘You can remember all of that?’
Qin Siyu looked at him. ‘Yes. Every word in every book. Do you believe me?’
‘I do.’ Wu Xintong sighed. ‘You really are a genius.’
Qin Siyu: ‘…………’
He’d been fooling him, the idiot.
Both days Wu Xintong left at five, leaving Qin Siyu to keep searching until just before the library closed at nine.
It was still summer vacation, so there were very few people in the library. After half past eight, Qin Siyu was usually the only one left.
He kept borrowing and flipping through books alone.
Red patches…
Anemia…
Reduced urination…
Syphilis testing…
Mental illness…
Abdominal pain…
Red urine…
Phew.
This was hard.
Qin Siyu wondered: Should I really trust my instincts?
The doctors were absolutely certain that one woman had syphilis and the other was mentally ill.
They’d seen so many cases. The girl’s denial of sexual experience meant nothing to them. The other patient’s case was much the same.
Am I becoming obsessed? he wondered.
But even as he thought it, he kept turning pages.
Aston had business at the student council that evening.
As he passed one of the university libraries, he glanced through its floor-to-ceiling windows and saw Qin Siyu inside.
A whole stack of books sat beside him. He was clearly searching for something. Again and again, he pulled over a volume, opened its contents and scanned a few lines, then turned to specific articles farther back, glanced at their summaries, and tossed the book aside.
Qin Siyu always did everything with such care and concentration. His head was bent, his movements swift, his long fingers extraordinarily deft.
Without realizing it, Aston watched for a long time.
At eight o’clock Qin Siyu finally looked up from his mountain of books, leaned back against his chair, and let out a long sigh.
He’d gone through all the most famous journals…
His back hurt terribly.
Qin Siyu began gathering up the books. He had just risen to return them when he felt someone watching him from outside one of the glass windows.
‘???’ Qin Siyu looked up and met Aston’s eyes.
Aston stood there tall and imposing, both hands in his pockets.
‘…’ Qin Siyu pointed toward the door and walked over.
After he’d passed beyond the long glass wall and was hidden behind a brick section, Qin Siyu couldn’t help straightening his clothes. He tucked his shirt back into his trousers, then pulled out a little fabric so it hung neatly, smoothed his collar and chest, bent to arrange his trouser hems over his shoes, straightened the creases, and even adjusted his belt to make sure the buckle faced forward. All the while he thought, Why am I fussing over this? Are you sick in the head?
Aston was already waiting for him at the entrance.
When he saw Qin Siyu, his eyes smiled. ‘Sean.’
These days, the instant Qin Siyu saw Aston’s eyes, he felt utterly bewitched. His throat dried and his legs went weak. Still, he didn’t want to look away. He simply stood staring.
Aston looked into those black eyes and smiled. ‘Sean, why aren’t you calling my name?’
Qin Siyu let his lips curve too. ‘Hi, Kingsley.’
His ears burned.
They smiled faintly at each other for a while.
Then the two of them walked beneath the streetlamps along a small path.
Aston asked, ‘Why are you at school?’
‘Looking up some medical information.’
‘Did something happen?’
‘You could say that.’ Qin Siyu told him about the two cases, frowning. ‘I can’t stop thinking about them. I can’t forget the look of suffering on the first girl’s face when she was accused of something she hadn’t done. And the second… Maybe I’m overthinking it, but is she really mentally ill? She seemed so cheerful and positive. Would she really become “mad” out of fear that her husband might lose his job, the way he says? I doubt that too.’
But… perhaps he really was overthinking.
Aston looked at Qin Siyu again.
Once more he wanted to make this person entirely his own.
Qin Siyu was too good. Aston wanted to possess him, to occupy a place so deep in his heart that everyone else combined couldn’t compare with a single strand of Aston’s hair.
He wanted Qin Siyu someday to be willing, for Aston’s sake, to turn his back on this world he loved and worked so hard to improve.
He wanted him someday to be willing, for Aston’s sake, to be hated and despised by every person he’d ever helped or cared about.
Aston would never allow those things to happen, but he craved the willingness.
Aston hid those dark thoughts and asked, ‘Have you made any progress?’
‘Hard to say.’ Qin Siyu frowned more deeply. ‘There are a few diseases with some of the right symptoms, but none that match the whole picture. Tomorrow I want to look at more papers from Europe.’
‘All right. Is there anything I can do?’
‘Not yet.’ Qin Siyu smiled. ‘I’ll look for myself. I have some experience now, so searching isn’t much trouble.’
‘Mm.’
They reached a long bench. Qin Siyu stopped and sat. ‘The moon is quite beautiful tonight.’
Aston raised his eyes and agreed. ‘It is.’
The moon seemed so near that he could reach out and catch it. Aston made a loose grasping motion.
Qin Siyu’s eyes followed the movement to the back of Aston’s hand.
Those fingers, those nails, those tendons and veins—
He even drew down Aston’s wrist, turned his hand palm-up, and studied it carefully.
Memorize the lines on his palm, the shape and outline, the joints of every finger, the curve of each nail…
That way his imagination would feel real in the future. Every night lately he’d been frustrated because he couldn’t recall the details of that hand clearly enough.
The greatest gain of the evening.
Aston asked, ‘What are you doing?’
Qin Siyu lied. ‘For a moment I thought you were bleeding. I was mistaken.’
He couldn’t tell the truth.
He didn’t know Aston was doing the same.
Over the past two weeks, Aston had used that hand every day to imitate what they’d done that night, touching himself and imagining the two of them standing before one another with no obstacles or clothes between them, even pressing together and rubbing against each other.
As they always did, they wanted to know what the other had been doing these past two weeks. Their knees brushed in the moonlight. Neither shifted away. They sat close, speaking softly.
Qin Sanfu was forever dreaming of making a fortune. The previous weekend he had met someone who had disappeared for ages and discovered the man had become rich. Feeling rather sour, he asked, ‘So you’re wealthy now. But are you happy?’
The man replied, ‘Couldn’t be better!’
Aston laughed quietly.
Qin Siyu told several more stories, then said that his mother and Qin Sanfu were very different.
His mother, Lin Xiangmei, was intensely practical, which meant she often dismissed his wishes.
Whatever Qin Siyu wanted, Lin Xiangmei would refuse him. ‘That’s useless.’ ‘Money needs to be spent where it matters.’
He had to do the ‘right’ things, the ‘useful’ things.
Qin Siyu thought: If Mother knew I wanted to be with a man, she’d never accept it.
The library was about to close, and he had to go back.
‘I’ll borrow a few more books before closing,’ Qin Siyu said. ‘I’m staying near campus these two days. I borrow some books every evening, and return them the next day.’
‘All right,’ Aston said. ‘I’ve taken up some time here too. Parker is waiting by the campus gate.’
‘Mm. You’d better get going.’
But despite saying this, Aston didn’t leave immediately.
He accompanied Qin Siyu from the outside, on the other side of the brick wall, walking alongside his steps. When they reached the floor-to-ceiling windows again, their eyes met once more.
One was inside, one outside. Their gazes followed each other all the way to a secluded corner obscured from view.
‘…’ Almost without realizing it, Qin Siyu stepped up to the window, raised his hand, and placed his palm against the glass.
Aston looked up. He glanced at the empty library inside, then lifted his hand and placed it against Qin Siyu’s through the glass.
Finger against finger, palm against palm.
As though this meant they weren’t really holding hands.
It was almost closing time. A nearby light went out with a click, enveloping them in darkness. Only a dim pool of light remained near the library entrance.
Qin Siyu heard the attendant at the door answer the telephone.
Several walls separated the attendant’s station from where Qin Siyu stood. Neither could see the other, and everyone else had already gone.
In the vast, empty library, the only sound was the attendant’s patient, gentle voice answering questions.
They leaned closer, gazing into each other’s eyes through the window in the moonlight, trying to see clearly.
Both glanced at their surroundings. There was nobody around.
Then, without knowing who moved first, they rested their foreheads together with the glass between them, trying to feel each other’s warmth.
Next came their noses.
And finally, again without knowing who began, they kissed the glass, lips moving as if they were sucking at each other’s mouths.
Lightly, once, then again.
The glass was cold and hard.
As though this meant they weren’t really kissing.
At one point they even extended their tongues, instinctively curling them against the opposite sides of the glass.
Of course they couldn’t touch, couldn’t truly press their tongues together or twine them. Their tongues felt only the glass, yet directly opposite was the other’s tongue.
But the illusion of meeting made Qin Siyu shiver all over for a moment.
Even with something between them, they wanted to draw warmth from each other.
After a little while, Qin Siyu heard the attendant hang up with a sharp click. Reluctantly he stepped away, gazed into Aston’s eyes a little longer, then took out a handkerchief, dampened it at the drinking fountain, and carefully wiped that damp patch clean, inside and out. He turned, gathered his books, and hurried away.
They hadn’t kissed tonight.
Not done that kind of thing while sober.